The Druze

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A traveler crossing the southern hills of Syria in the last century would have learned to read the men of the villages by their heads. Some wore the white turban wound tight and low, and walked with the gravity of people who knew something; others went bareheaded or in ordinary dress and seemed to know nothing in particular. The first were the knowers. The second were the keepers of fields and feuds. Between them ran a line that no marriage could cross and no curiosity could breach, and it was, in the end, the same line that organized the whole people: a community split into those who hold its secret and those who carry it without being told what it is.

They are called the Druze, and the name is not theirs. They call themselves the Muwahhidun, the affirmers of God’s absolute unity — the unitarians, in the old strict sense of that word, those for whom God is one to the point of being beyond all description. The exonym fastened to them by accident, from a missionary they came to despise, and it stuck, as such names do. Perhaps a million of them live today in the mountains and plains of the Levant: in Mount Lebanon, in the Jabal al-Druze of southern Syria around Suwayda, in the Galilee and on Mount Carmel in Israel, in a corner of Jordan, with diaspora communities scattered as far as Venezuela. They are one of the world’s smallest and most sealed religious peoples, a fixed number of souls, by their own account, turning through history.

Genealogy: a doctrine proclaimed in Cairo

The faith was born in the brilliant, unstable world of Fatimid Egypt at the opening of the eleventh century. The Fatimids were the great Shi’i dynasty of the medieval Mediterranean, an Isma’ili caliphate ruling from Cairo whose theology was already steeped in cosmic hierarchies, hidden meanings, and the figure of the imam as the living axis of the world. From within that current, in the years around 1017, a new and far more radical message broke into the open.

Its author was a missionary named Hamza ibn Ali ibn Ahmad, by tradition a felt-maker from Khorasan in eastern Iran, who arrived in Cairo and began to preach in the year 1017. Hamza taught that the long chain of prophets and imams had reached its end, that the cycles of revealed law were closing, and that the divine reality which stands behind all of them had now shown itself directly — in the person of the reigning caliph, al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah. Al-Hakim was a strange and frightening sovereign, ascetic and unpredictable, given to nocturnal rides through the city and to edicts that overturned themselves. He ruled from 996 to 1021. To Hamza, his very strangeness was a sign: the One had become manifest, and the world had not recognized it.

The Mosque of al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah in Cairo, named for the sixth Fatimid caliph in whom the Muwahhidun hold the divine showed itself. — Mohammed Moussa, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Around Hamza gathered a small circle of preachers, and out of their rivalry came the accident that named the people. One of them was Muhammad ad-Darazi, a missionary who pressed the claim of al-Hakim’s divinity with an aggression and self-promotion that Hamza judged both premature and corrupt. The two fell out; ad-Darazi was repudiated as a renegade and an impostor, and he was killed soon after, about 1019 (the date is given variously between 1018 and 1020). Yet his name, in the form Duruz, attached itself to the whole movement in the mouths of outsiders, so that the followers of Hamza became known to the world by the name of the man their own tradition curses. They have never accepted it, and the irritation is old.

The decisive break came in 1021, when al-Hakim rode out into the Muqattam hills above Cairo one night and never returned. To the world it was a disappearance, very likely an assassination amid the intrigues of his court. To the Muwahhidun it was something else: not a death but an occultation, a deliberate withdrawal into concealment. Al-Hakim had hidden himself, taking Hamza and his closest companions with him, to test the faithful and to await the appointed hour of his return. Persecution fell hard on the young community in the years that followed, under al-Hakim’s successor; tens of thousands are remembered as killed in the Levantine towns. The movement went underground and survived in the inaccessible mountains.

Leadership of the scattered believers passed to a Persian convert, al-Muqtana Baha al-Din, who guided the community by letter for two decades and shaped its doctrine into a transmissible form. Then, in 1043, he closed it. He declared that the call would accept no further souls — that the door of conversion was shut and would not be opened again. From that year the faith has admitted no newcomers. One is born Muwahhid or one is forever outside.

Teaching: the unity, the manifestation, and the return

At the center of the faith stands an idea of God so austere that it consumes every image. God in His own being is the absolute One, beyond name, attribute, number, and comprehension — not a person, not a presence, not anything the mind can hold. The whole apparatus of religion, in the Druze view, exists to lead the soul toward this unsayable unity and then to fall silent before it.

And yet the One has not left the world without a face. The teaching holds that across the ages the divine reality has made itself manifest in human form, in a series of appearances or stations, each adapted to its age and each unrecognized by the multitude. The last and most complete of these manifestations was al-Hakim. This is the hinge on which the faith turns, and it is also the doctrine that most scandalizes its monotheist neighbors, for whom God taking human shape is the gravest of errors. The Muwahhidun answer that they do not say God is a man; they say the unknowable One has shown itself through a man, as a meaning shows through a sign. Al-Hakim did not die. He withdrew. At the end of the present age he will appear again, and in his return the long concealment of the truth will end and justice will be established over the earth.

Between the hidden One and the mass of the faithful stretches a ladder of cosmic ranks, the hudud — a word meaning “limits” or “bounds,” the great principles through which creation is ordered. Hamza systematized five of them as luminaries, and they form the metaphysical skeleton of the religion. First is Universal Intelligence, al-Aql, embodied in Hamza himself; from it proceeds Universal Soul, al-Nafs; then the Word, al-Kalima; then two further principles, the Preceder and the Follower, al-Sabiq and al-Tali, the cause and the effect, the wing that reaches into the past and the wing that reaches into the future. These five are the colors of the famous Druze star — green for Intelligence, red for Soul, yellow for the Word, blue for the Preceder, white for the Follower — a banner of five bands that a stranger might take for mere decoration and that is, in fact, a diagram of the cosmos. The hierarchy of luminaries belongs to the inheritance the faith carried out of its Isma’ili and Neoplatonic background, where being descends from a transcendent One through a graded series of intelligences and souls; the Druze took that architecture and rebuilt it around al-Hakim and Hamza.

The five-colored Druze star and flag, a diagram of the cosmic principles, or hudud. — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

To this is joined a teaching about the soul that gives the community its peculiar closedness. The Muwahhidun hold tanasukh, the transmigration of souls — but in a strict and tribal form. When a Druze dies, the soul does not wait, does not pass through other kinds of being, does not enter the body of an animal or a stranger. It passes at once, in the very instant of death, into the body of another Druze newly born. The number of souls in the world is fixed and unchanging; they have always been the same souls, cycling through generation after generation, and they always will be. This is why the door was closed in 1043 and why it can never reopen: there are no new souls to admit. To be born Druze is to be an old soul returning, and every Druze alive has lived before, within this same people, since the beginning. The doctrine is the metaphysical ground of the endogamy — one marries within because one has always belonged within — and it sets the community apart from the wider Indic and Mediterranean families of rebirth belief, which let the soul wander across the whole field of living things. Here the wheel turns inside a single nation.

The keeping of all this is divided. The community separates into two orders. The uqqal, the “knowers” or initiated, are those who have been received into the religious mysteries; they alone read the scriptures, attend the full assemblies, observe the dietary and moral disciplines in their strictest form, and wear the marks of their station — the men in white turbans, the women in white veils. The most learned and ascetic among them are honored as sheikhs and retire to the khalwa, the place of seclusion, to study and copy the holy books. The rest of the people are the juhhal, the “uninitiated” — not a despised class but the great majority, who marry and farm and fight and carry the faith in their blood without being taught its contents. A juhhal who proves worthy may be admitted to the ranks of the uqqal; the line is permeable from below, in the right direction. But the teaching itself remains the property of the few, and an ordinary Druze may live a whole devout life knowing almost nothing of what their own scripture says.

That scripture is the Rasa’il al-Hikma, the Epistles of Wisdom — a canon of one hundred and eleven epistles in six volumes, composed in the founding decades by Hamza, al-Muqtana, and the other luminaries. It is a closed book in the fullest sense: not printed for the public, not taught to the uninitiated, guarded within the assemblies of the uqqal and copied by hand. What leaked into outside hands over the centuries did so against the community’s will, and the faith has never recognized the curiosity of scholars as a right.

Wrapped around the whole edifice is the discipline that made survival possible: taqiyya, the prudent concealment of belief. The principle is shared across Shi’i Islam, where a persecuted minority may hide its convictions to escape harm. Among the Druze it became more than a permission; it became a way of being in the world. A people that holds its God to have appeared in a caliph the surrounding orthodoxies regard as a heretic, and that teaches doctrines no neighbor would tolerate, learned early to show the world a calm and accommodating surface. They prayed where their rulers prayed, married within, and said little. The wall of silence was not a refusal to communicate. It was a fortification.

Reception: the mountain people and the closed door

A faith with no missionaries and no converts becomes, of necessity, a nation. Cut off from the wider world of Islam by doctrines it could not share and would not explain, the Druze became a self-contained people of the high country, holding their mountains as much by the sword as by belief. Their history in the Levant is a history of fortified villages, clan confederations, and a fierce reputation in arms that bought them a margin of autonomy under Mamluk and Ottoman overlords who found it easier to bargain with the mountain than to conquer it.

Druze of Mount Carmel at a meal, late nineteenth century. — Felix Bonfils, Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

In Mount Lebanon the Druze produced dynasties that ruled far beyond their own numbers. The house of Ma’n, and above all the emir Fakhr al-Din II, who held most of Lebanon in the early seventeenth century, built a polity in which Druze and Christian lived under one prince; when the Ma’n line failed in 1697 the notables turned to the Shihab family in their place. The arrangement held for generations and then broke. In 1860 the long tension between Druze and Maronite Christians in Mount Lebanon and Damascus erupted into massacre — thousands of Christians killed, and thousands of Druze with them — drawing in the Ottoman state, a French expedition, and the attention of all Europe. It was during the troubles of that mid-century that the southern Syrian highland around Suwayda filled with Druze migrants and earned the name it still bears, the Jabal al-Druze, the Mountain of the Druze. There, under the French Mandate, the mountain was briefly an autonomous statelet between the world wars, and from it came the great revolt of 1925 that set the whole of Syria alight.

In the Galilee and on Mount Carmel the Druze went a different way. Within the State of Israel they took up a distinct civic position, serving in the army and standing somewhat apart from their Muslim Arab neighbors — a separateness consistent with a people who have always understood themselves as their own kind, allied to whatever order shelters them and absorbed by none. In Lebanon the community remained a political force out of all proportion to its size, gathered for much of the twentieth century behind the Jumblatt family and its party, and bloodied again in the long civil war. Everywhere the same instinct held: survive by closing ranks, bend with the prevailing power, keep the inner thing inviolate.

The outside world’s relation to the Druze has been one of long, frustrated fascination. Here is a people whose secret is real — an actual hidden scripture, an actual closed doctrine — and who guard it not with mystification but with simple refusal. Travelers, missionaries, colonial officers, and scholars have circled the community for two centuries trying to learn what the Epistles say, and the community has answered, in effect, that it is none of their concern, and very often that it is none of the concern of most Druze either. The strangeness that draws the outsider is not that the Druze hide a teaching from the world. It is that they hide it from themselves, entrusting the substance of the faith to a minority of knowers and asking of everyone else only that they be born, marry within, keep faith with the people, and wait. The Muwahhidun have lasted a thousand years on that arrangement, a fixed company of souls returning into the same mountains, and they are in no hurry to be understood.

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